Heath Gilmore, Matthew Knott

The federal government's Commonwealth Scholarship scheme will benefit elite universities at the expense of institutions that attract students from poor, disadvantaged and regional backgrounds, a leading vice-chancellor says.

Caroline McMillen of the University of Newcastle said the higher education reforms threatened the inter-generational mobility of Australians through their access to tertiary education.

''I am not sanguine about the G8 universities' ability to use equity scholarships to make a difference,'' she said. ''These institutions do not have a good track record in this area with an average of 8 per cent of their students [from disadvantaged and lower socio-economic backgrounds].

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''Poorer students doing poorer degrees is not an exceptional situation for Australia.''

The government announced in last month's budget that it would allow universities to structure the fees they charge for different courses. Higher education institutions will be required to commit $1 in every $5 of additional revenue from the fees to a new Commonwealth Scholarship scheme to support student access, participation and success.

This means universities able to charge premium fees will end up with a larger scholarship funding pool, but the government's definition of what constitutes a disadvantaged student remains unclear.

Last month University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence expressed his concerns that students from middle class families would need support to ensure that they are not locked out of institutions that set high fees.

The office of Education Minister Christopher Pyne on Tuesday released further details of the scheme, including that all scholarship money raised from the increased fees would remain with host institutions, which would draw up three-year access and participation agreements with the government. ''Institutions are best placed to know what assistance individual students need and will be able to provide individualised support, tailored to the needs of their student base,'' a spokesman for the minister said.

The Group of Eight universities has been advocating the additional equity scholarships, arguing such scholarships could address both tuition costs and living expenses, thus clearing one of the real barriers to study suffered by low socio-economic status students.

Professor McMillen said regional universities like Newcastle, where 23 per cent of its enrolments are from lower socio-economic backgrounds, would struggle to implement a substantial scholarship scheme. She said the financially disadvantaged background of a large number of its student intake would restrict the institution's ability to set higher course fees.

Instead, the vice-chancellor advocated up to 60 per cent of scholarship money raised from all the institutions should be pooled and distributed across the sector based on social equity performance.

Flinders University vice-chancellor Michael Barber said he was worried that students - including low-income students - would pay for the scholarships through higher fees. ''That galls me,'' he said, adding he believes the government should help fund the scholarships.

8 comments

Wouldn't it be cheaper and easier to simply buy a degree online. I know of one guy who simply falsified his qualifications and still got the job. He had it for two years until he was sprung by accident, and not because he couldn't do the job. Some of these job specifications should perhaps be written so that they are performance based and not so dependent on academic qualifications. An education is valuable if it teaches people how to think, rationalize and solve problems. I've met many who have degrees without those capabilities, and many without degrees who have all of those capabilities. All it would take would be some simple practical test at interview to sort the wheat from the chaff. Might provide work for psychologists , as the chaplains have now got the venue in schools.

Commenter

adam

Location

yarrawonga

Date and time

June 11, 2014, 10:31AM

I think degrees might become a thing of the past here with abbotts scheme.

Unless young ones can find a way to go overseas where they may be cheaper.

I mean who wants to pay $100,000 for a degree at high compounding interest, when the job a person may or may not get at the end of it only pays them around $50,000 a year, because abbott wants to cut wages anyway?

I know some cleaners who work for themselves that get more than that.

Commenter

Wyn

Date and time

June 11, 2014, 11:29AM

This is the Coalition's class war by stealth. Let's just make university so damned expensive that only the children of the rich and rich foreign students can afford a university education. Let's also under fund state school education so that the students of these are on a very uneven playing field. Let's abandon the Australia of a fair go and strengthen the class system in Australia. Who voted for these morons?

I'm sure that is exactly what Tony Abbott intended, unfortunately. I can't imagine many Indigenous students will undertake debts of $100,000 in order to get a degree, as well as pay commercial interest on living allowances. Accessible scholarships will be few and far between.

Commenter

June

Date and time

June 11, 2014, 10:45AM

The rate of poor attending universities has been the same since the days of free education to the HECS and full fee paying schemes now.

It is only the upper middle class and the rich who have benefited enormously from tertiary education.

Commenter

Regh

Date and time

June 11, 2014, 12:45PM

What a hugely unexpected turn of events.Seriously though, the poster above who mentioned buying the piece of paper - it's going to become all the more common. In the States I understand it's a fairly massive problem with people buying things like medical qualifications particularly, but I still wouldn't want my engineer or animal-husbandry-ist having zero knowledge of their qualifications.It'll start happening more commonly though, watch this space.

Commenter

frank

Date and time

June 11, 2014, 12:57PM

Another Abbott/Pyne/Hockey thought bubble. Poorer regional universities will remain poor because they will have to suffer cuts without raising fees, because most of their students, unlike the G8 are from poor socio-economic backgrounds. Given that they won't have markedly higher fees, they won't be able to build up a decent scholarship fund. So it's logical that elite universities who can charge higher fees will build up bigger scholarship funds to hand out to their wealthy students.